[ANN] ChipMixer.com - Bitcoin mixer / Bitcoin tumbler - mixing reinvented

[bct_ail]

In summary, it's the court documents accusing the suspect in this case.

Thank you for the explanation. I was not quite sure if I understood the document correctly.

I can guarantee you that these 7TB include private keys, since I have seen funds withdrawn from ChipMixer (imported private keys)) disappear on the day of the ChipMixer takedown.

The authorities have certainly not only access to the servers since yesterday. Therefore they have certainly been recording the data for a long time. Is it known how old the oldest compromised private key (chip) is?

Related to the 7TB. Did chipmixer also run its own nodes? If so, then part of the 7 TB are certainly their own nodes.

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[aioc]

I recommend you have a browse through the court document to see the investigation into him (starts around page 28):
https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1574581/download

I do not understand exactly what this document is? The internet address says "press release". So this is just a general document for the press? Or documentation of all the evidence and procedure from the special agent?

In any case our forum are very common there. The word Bitcointalk ist 14 times represented.

In a democratic like the United States, all court records are public records since there is a case number I consider this the official documentation of all pieces of evidence, this is the first part and we will see more when they arrested the owners and criminal procedures start and end, this is a landmark case because the US justice and prosecutors will investigate the full responsibility of mixers on money laundering.

[trainer1234]

Well in my point of view if "he" or " them " worked way more professional then why did they choose an " onshore " hosting even if its maybe one out of X servers in their internal structure.

I mean choosing such an jurisdiction for hosting such a website doesnt make any sense. I mean we talk about hetzner which reacts very strict to any kind of abuse against their ToS and chipmixer/crypto falls for sure under their terms.


So imo i think they didnt even work properly from the beginning when choosing the server location. They might have some technical knowledge to setup the infrastructure but they didnt even think twice about the server location itself.

[LoyceV]

Well in my point of view if "he" or " them " worked way more professional then why did they choose an " onshore " hosting even if its maybe one out of X servers in their internal structure.

My guess is they wanted a reliable party who doesn't snoop around in their server (which is loaded with private keys).

[JollyGood]

That is just another question in a long list of other questions about exactly what happened. If someone wanted to create a mixer or anonymity based service they should at least have researched about that. As you said, to have hosting based in a jurisdiction that could damage the privacy promises they made to their customers is basically contradictory and counterproductive to their aims.

Well in my point of view if "he" or " them " worked way more professional then why did they choose an " onshore " hosting even if its maybe one out of X servers in their internal structure.

I mean choosing such an jurisdiction for hosting such a website doesnt make any sense. I mean we talk about hetzner which reacts very strict to any kind of abuse against their ToS and chipmixer/crypto falls for sure under their terms.


So imo i think they didnt even work properly from the beginning when choosing the server location. They might have some technical knowledge to setup the infrastructure but they didnt even think twice about the server location itself.

[mindrust]

That is just another question in a long list of other questions about exactly what happened. If someone wanted to create a mixer or anonymity based service they should at least have researched about that. As you said, to have hosting based in a jurisdiction that could damage the privacy promises they made to their customers is basically contradictory and counterproductive to their aims.

Well in my point of view if "he" or " them " worked way more professional then why did they choose an " onshore " hosting even if its maybe one out of X servers in their internal structure.

I mean choosing such an jurisdiction for hosting such a website doesnt make any sense. I mean we talk about hetzner which reacts very strict to any kind of abuse against their ToS and chipmixer/crypto falls for sure under their terms.


So imo i think they didnt even work properly from the beginning when choosing the server location. They might have some technical knowledge to setup the infrastructure but they didnt even think twice about the server location itself.

It is impossible to be anonymous when you offer your services on a .com domain anyway. The US practically owns every .com domain out there. How on earth can they seize any .com domain they want? That's because they own the domain providers too. (hosting/domain providers pay taxes to the government which make them a government partner)

Privacy and Internet don't mix well.

[trainer1234]

Well just to add something on top of it,



Hetzner doesnt even offer Crypto payments to pay the invoice/rent hosting.


So chipmixer used a provider who resells the server of hetzner which means that that this " middleman " provider could snoop around aswell and as also a security breach itself on top of that   or CM paid the invoices through paypal maybe directly at hetzner?

on top of that: Hetzner needs an ID document in order to get a server  ( in case you order directly from them )


I dont want to make false conclusions but the operators of CM didnt even made an own based research hosting wise.

[JollyGood]

I will not detract from what you said because you have a valid point because internet and privacy do not mix well but now that (probably) the biggest mixer is out of business, it really does not look for the other mixers out there. I have no doubt soon they all will have to either shut down voluntarily in order to avoid having their domains seized or will suffer the same fate as Chipmixer.

It is impossible to be anonymous when you offer your services on a .com domain anyway. The US practically owns every .com domain out there. How on earth can they seize any .com domain they want? That's because they own the domain providers too. (hosting/domain providers pay taxes to the government which make them a government partner)

Privacy and Internet don't mix well.

[n0nce]

I dont want to make false conclusions but the operators of CM didnt even made an own based research hosting wise.

Besides the fact that these types of speculations have no productive outcome, I personally believe this is too far fetched.
After all, ChipMixer has been one of the longest-standing mixers out there, mixing a ton of BTC, meanwhile others have come and gone. Even to the point where a few months ago people started speculating whether CM was a honeypot.

To me, it looks like the ChipMixer operators have run it quite competently, with the one mistake (if actually true) to store 7 actual TB of data. What makes or breaks a privacy service (for me) is that they collect and store as little data as possible.
In a business context, 7TB is nothing. That's what people have in their personal home NAS systems. But for a privacy service, I don't know what kind of big files you really need to permanently store.

One remark: I had a personal theory that 7TB was just the amount of purchased server storage (again, nothing for a powerful / enterprise server), which was simply mostly empty. Law enforcement could have seized old, funded keys by getting their hands on the drives and performing forensic techniques to recover permanently deleted files.
However, since even chips created a few days before the takedown were affected, this is not really plausible.

[JollyGood]

The part that I do not understand is how far back the retrieval of funds goes. If they managed to seize $46 million in Germany via the confiscated servers and the 7TB back up data (if I understood correctly), would that have been all the unused chips that were not sent out to those that wanted to mix and it so happened to account to $46 million, or was it something else.

Maybe you are right, the 7TB data could have been contained minimal mix related information, we have to wait for the information to be put out by the relevant agencies to understand what data it contained.

Besides the fact that these types of speculations have no productive outcome, I personally believe this is too far fetched.
After all, ChipMixer has been one of the longest-standing mixers out there, mixing a ton of BTC, meanwhile others have come and gone. Even to the point where a few months ago people started speculating whether CM was a honeypot.

To me, it looks like the ChipMixer operators have run it quite competently, with the one mistake (if actually true) to store 7 actual TB of data. What makes or breaks a privacy service (for me) is that they collect and store as little data as possible.
In a business context, 7TB is nothing. That's what people have in their personal home NAS systems. But for a privacy service, I don't know what kind of big files you really need to permanently store.

One remark: I had a personal theory that 7TB was just the amount of purchased server storage (again, nothing for a powerful / enterprise server), which was simply mostly empty. Law enforcement could have seized old, funded keys by getting their hands on the drives and performing forensic techniques to recover permanently deleted files.
However, since even chips created a few days before the takedown were affected, this is not really plausible.

[coupable]

By having the private keys, law enforcement was able to seize all the Bitcoin controlled by those keys.
If ChipMixer would have deleted them after handing out a chip, they wouldn't have been able to do that.

We do not know what it the content and source of 7GB data mentioned before. I may imagine the situation where CM operator deleted private keys and/or session data as it was promised, but if server has been hosted using serious datacenter, regular backups were done. In my opinion it is not impossible that some data comes from backups (restore points) made by hosting operator.

It is 7TB. If backups were done that include the private keys, that was a big mistake. I can guarantee you that these 7TB include private keys, since I have seen funds withdrawn from ChipMixer (imported private keys)) disappear on the day of the ChipMixer takedown.

It is still hard for me to believe that Chipmixer, which we have considered reliable and supported by the most honest members of the forum for years, has kept user data in those 7 terabytes that were discovered.
It occurred to me that it might contain nodes data that Chipmixer was supposed to be running on the blockchain. I don't expect that ChipMixer uses nodes from another party.
In addition, of course, to the private keys for the chips that were being produced for the service. Is it possible that the size of these nodes is 7 terabytes?

[LoyceV]

In addition, of course, to the private keys for the chips that were being produced for the service. Is it possible that the size of these nodes is 7 terabytes?

A node is 0.5 TB, times 4 servers makes 2 TB. Maybe times a few backups to reach 7 TB.
User data and private keys will never be that large, no matter how much they logged.

[BlackHatCoiner]

To me, it looks like the ChipMixer operators have run it quite competently

I'm not so sure, because if the feds didn't break into Mihn's place, then he likely didn't have the control in the first place. I read it was hosted on DigitalOcean, whose reputation I'm not aware of, but I'm aware it's a middleman. The best course of a mixer is to run it on some machine you possess, and to obfuscate your location, use Tor.

I think that ChipMixer's biggest mistake was to not go fully anonymous from the beginning.


As for the 7 TB: we know absolutely nothing of what ChipMixer held there (IIRC), besides private keys (which if I remember correctly were not supposed to be deleted). The only thing I remember highlighted is that they delete logs.

[jack80]

at present, is there a chipmixer-style mixer service? a service that gives private keys as chips? Right now I'm only finding old-fashioned, headache-inducing mixer services,entering time intervals, downloading letters of guarantee... welcome back to the year 2015 

[JollyGood]

As mentioned in a post in a different thread, it could be anything or nothing. Maybe the OS and related server updates were on the same disk. Eventually it will be made public but not all of it has to be related to the running of the actual mixing part of the website. Could it be 7TB was the size of the disk but the used space was much less?

As for the 7 TB: we know absolutely nothing of what ChipMixer held there (IIRC), besides private keys (which if I remember correctly were not supposed to be deleted). The only thing I remember highlighted is that they delete logs.

[crewdede]

The prosecutor said that those keys were confiscated, and everybody who is using an BTC Mixer/Cleaner service is actually doing money laundering. So , what will happen now? I used to buy FOOD each day , by washing my BTC and using those keys. I did it to keep it separated from others things I did. I don't want police to know i watch porn, i send money to girls to show tits for example and so on.
Please advice

[Saint-loup]

Cloudflare is basically a legitimized man-in-the-middle attack, ie. while the data gets encrypted between User / Cloudflare and Cloudflare / ChipMixer the data still gets decrypted -- and possibly stored -- on Cloudflare's server.

This is correct.
In case of other mixers using CloudFlare, CloudFlare knows your input address and output addresses. In our case, if we would use CloudFlare, CloudFlare would know input addresses and private keys. CloudFlare is US company so it is reasonable to think that any three letter institution could get an access by court order.

In this report the FBI claims that you were hosting Chipmixer website at a US provider DigitalOcean until May 2022, why have you made this choice if you think US companies can easily hand over access to any "three letter institution"?

Until May 2022, chipmixer.com was a functional clearnet website that was hosted at a U.S. virtual private server (VPS) provider, DigitalOcean.

Your assumption was right indeed, because they claim to have accessed it in November 2021.

On November 23, 2021, the FBI served a federal search warrant to DigitalOcean for chipmixer.com, which was located at the IP address 46.101.124.25. DigitalOcean provided the FBI an image of the server.

In addition, I don't understand why you've wanted to run your business at US if you thought it could break some american laws according to US courts themselves.  
There were no reliable hosting providers available at more permissive jurisdictions?
It's a little bit confusing for me.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1574581/download

[trainer1234]

The prosecutor said that those keys were confiscated, and everybody who is using an BTC Mixer/Cleaner service is actually doing money laundering. So , what will happen now? I used to buy FOOD each day , by washing my BTC and using those keys. I did it to keep it separated from others things I did. I don't want police to know i watch porn, i send money to girls to show tits for example and so on.
Please advice

The Output Wallet adresses behind the private keys were public on the blockchain anyways, regardless if the LE could have all the information/private keys through the backup now.

The only difference in this case is that, they now know 100% which of those split chips ( 0.004 , 0.008  etc ) is 100% linked to CM and which are not.


However, even if they have a full log of all private keys ( claimed and unclaimed ), the final adress whatever service it is link to needs to be first identified. After that this Service behind this final url has to identify the user too.

So up to the service, jurisdiction etc there can be still stored logs of the user or not.  Also even if they have all those logs it takes ages to identify the user and if so they have to proove that he was the individual whom used CM. So this cant be fully proven because you could say that you bought those coins from a p2p trade...

so i would not worry about that.

[Saint-loup]

The prosecutor said that those keys were confiscated, and everybody who is using an BTC Mixer/Cleaner service is actually doing money laundering. So , what will happen now? I used to buy FOOD each day , by washing my BTC and using those keys. I did it to keep it separated from others things I did. I don't want police to know i watch porn, i send money to girls to show tits for example and so on.
Please advice

The prosecutor is really saying that? Do you have a link of this claim please? I'm not much familiar with American laws, but AFAIK to launder or to clean funds, you need to use dirty funds first. If you are obfuscating your transactions from clean funds, you are just concealing legal funds, you are not laundering anything, for me. This statement doesn't seem to respect the Fifth Amendment at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Laundering_Control_Act

[decodx]

The prosecutor said that those keys were confiscated, and everybody who is using an BTC Mixer/Cleaner service is actually doing money laundering. So , what will happen now?

They never stated that. Their claim was that CM was involved in money laundering because, according to them, a significant number of coins originated from illicit activities. But they did not claim that all users of CM were involved in money laundering. It's important to distinguish between the two claims.

I don't want police to know i watch porn, i send money to girls to show tits for example and so on.
Please advice

What would be the police's interest in such a matter? Is it considered illegal in your jurisdiction?